An In Between Reality
by FaylinnNorse
Summary: What is it you want from me?" She looked at him with surprisingly solemn eyes. "Not from you, necessarily," she began, "I just want to be Real." A story of Reality, Fantasy, and the blur in between.


**This was written for my English class, so comments on improving it are most welcome. It's due tomorrow, though, so be quick about it! And I'd just generally love to hear what you had to say, because I put a lot of effort into this idea that, at the start, was incredibly vague...I'd like to know how it turned out. So review, please!**

* * *

The old man rowed his boat skillfully between the rocks, careful not to get in too shallow, not to scrape up his boat. He wouldn't want that; he'd been in one bad shipwreck in his lifetime, and it was quite enough for him. All he really wanted to do now was fish and sit for a while in the gently rocking waves, before he rowed back home again.

He saw something, though--something in the water that made him stop. A green bottle was floating there, bobbing up and down in the waves. Maneuvering his way over to it, he reached down and picked it up. There was a note inside. He removed the cork, feeling his old heart beating faster and faster. But that was nonsense. It was years ago. He was unconscious. But still, he could hope, couldn't he? He paused for a moment, thinking, then closed his eyes; he could remember it all so well.

* * *

He was grabbing at the ropes on the sloop again, as a young man, strong and hardy. He was trying to get a grip on the sail: pull it over and tie it off where it would stay. The water splashing everywhere made it slippery, hard to hold onto, and the entire boat was rocking tumultuously in the high waves. He got it, though, he had it—and then the lightning. He heard the splintering wood ringing in his ears, and it was burning, bright and hot, and there were rocks, rising out of the deck; they were crashing, crashing, crashing. His head throbbed once, and everything faded to black.

* * *

He woke up bleeding, with a gash running down his cheek and crimson blood flowing freely from it. He was on an island that was too good to be true. The sand was fine and white, powdery as anyone could wish for, and the waves were blue like the sky. Mist hung in patches, scattering the sunlight throughout until they were mere clouds of gold. It started raining, wet drops cascading down on him while the sun was still shining, and the whole thing felt like some crazy enchantment, like magic was thick in the air.

And then he saw her. At the edge of the green forest, sitting by her irises, but with her head tilted to the sky, gazing in rapture at the sunlight. She was perfection itself. Everything about her green eyes and red-brown hair, the way her green ribbon was tied in a bow at the end of it, how it matched her eyes. He didn't notice it all then, though, not the way he should have. He only wanted one thing: to get off the island.

He spent days formulating an escape. He tried everything he knew. He chopped down her trees while she stood at his side or danced all around him, prancing through the soft breeze. After all his hard work, through all her distractions, the trees were always standing back up, towering and reaching to the sky by the next morning. It was the same if he carved out a log that was already fallen, trying to form it into a makeshift boat. It didn't last, nothing did. Once he even tried swimming away, but he couldn't even drown; he was automatically washed back into shore.

She always laughed at him, with sparkling eyes. Finally he asked her what was wrong with the island? Why couldn't he leave it? He needed to get back, to go home, where he belonged! He wanted to move around and sail, like he always did! He wouldn't stay with her.

She shrugged and told him that he couldn't leave until she allowed it, and she wasn't planning on allowing it anytime soon. He yelled at her, screamed at her, but she just watched him, smiling, and listened patiently until he was done.

"Well, perhaps you need to learn how to stay in one place for a while, since you abandoned all those poor girls in their separate ports. What were their names again? Sara, Elsie, May, Desiree?"

He bristled under her serene tone. "How do you know about them?" he asked, scowling.

"You told me while you were fuming," she laughed, skipping past him again.

He glared at her bouncing back before starting after her. "What is it you want from me?" he'd asked, catching up at last. Maybe if he gave her something, whatever it was, she'd let him leave.

She stopped then and looked at him with surprisingly solemn eyes. "Not from you, necessarily," she began, "I just want to be Real."

It was a capitalized word in her vocabulary. She'd never spelled it for him, but he just knew. For other people, it was simple. They were real; fairy stories, imagination, and daydreams were not. For her, the lines were blurred in the middle. She existed, in some manner of speaking, but to be really Real took more than that. So it was capitalized.

He hadn't understood it, for some time. He asked her repeatedly what she meant by it, but her explanations rarely made much sense. "But how are you here, if you're not Real? How am I here? And what do you mean by Real anyhow?"

She sighed. "Look at me, Mathieu. I've never tasted anything that wasn't sweet, never felt anything that wasn't soft, never heard anything that wasn't the purest music, never seen anything that wasn't beautiful. Until I met you, that is. Oh, I don't mean you were horridly ugly or anything, but you had that jagged gash down your cheek and all the blood and...but it was beautiful," she turned abruptly then to face him, and he nearly ran straight into her. "The vivid color, running like a river down your face and...the feeling. I don't feel very much. I don't know what pain feels like. I live here and I take care of my irises, because it makes me feel important. But I'm not. They'd go on fine without me, because they're not Real and neither am I."

They kept walking, and he thought that maybe he began to understand her. Not very well, because she was too ethereal to really understand, but he could grasp at the basics. She was like a fairytale princess or an elfin child, but instead of dreaming of a prince or roses or castles, she dreamed of something else altogether. Of pain, maybe. Of places where you had to grow your own flowers, maybe only in your imagination, or maybe digging your hands through the mud until they were raw. She pretended to do it with her irises, but it was only pretend.

Then came the day he couldn't take it anymore. It was the restlessness again, digging at his mind, tearing him apart. He wanted to move; he needed a change. On the island, everything was the same, meaningless perfection, day after day. It drove him mad. He'd never stayed anywhere for long, and he certainly didn't want to stay _there_. He wouldn't give up his freedom. He'd never given up anything before, not for anybody. So he shouted at her, trying to demand her to give him what he wanted.

"You're not Real, Adelaide! This whole place, it's—it's a fantasy, a fairytale. It's an illusion. How do you expect me to stay here when there _is_ no here?"

He'd hurt her with that, he could tell. She'd told him herself she wasn't Real, but she didn't want to hear it from him. Maybe it was because he _was_ Real; what he said had to be taken as truth, while she could spout lines of fancy. However she only asked him, calmly, "And what, exactly, do you define as being Real, Mathieu?"

He'd had to think about it. It seemed like something so clearly defined, but when he really considered it, the picture faded altogether. "It's...well, it's being, it's existing, it's—it's in your blood and your sweat. It's your tears and hurt, but it's being happy, too. It's...the way you change like that, how it's never the same and nothing is easy, but it's just...living." He was almost sorry to say it, because he knew for a fact she'd never been hurt before, but it was true. You couldn't live without being hurt; it was a part of life. You wouldn't even know what being happy was without ever being hurt. It was like day and night. If you'd never spent a night in the dark, you couldn't say what day was. But she was...living in between, in an enchanted dawn or dusk, in between realities.

Her next line had confused him. "Kiss me," she said, looking at him with that singular longing for what she wasn't. "Maybe, maybe you can make me Real, somehow."

"Adelaide..." was all he'd said.

"Then just touch me, Mathieu! I've never been touched before, I've never even talked to anyone but you! I just...I want to know what it feels like...to be real."

There was such desperation in her voice that he had to agree. He'd reached his fingers out slowly to hers, closer, closer—and he went through her. Like there was nothing there but air. There was a white blur for a moment, before her hand regained its shape. He stared in something like horror. He knew she wasn't Real, but...he didn't think he'd go _through_ her!

She didn't seem surprised, though, just disappointed maybe.

"Adelaide, I'm sorry. You're not..." he didn't finish. He didn't want to hurt her.

She looked like she was breaking into a million pieces in front of him, though. He felt sorry. And for the first time in his life, he wanted to help someone. But he didn't know how. He couldn't make her real; that much was clear. What else did she want? "I'll...stay with you," he said, slowly at first, almost shocked by his own words. Stay with her? Wasn't that what they'd been arguing about in the first place, the fact that he wanted to leave, to go back to the Real world, and she didn't want him to? The Real world didn't seem so important now, though, not with his pretend princess alone on her paradise island.

She looked up at him, startled, a sudden light and joy coming into her eyes. Their green seemed to grow greener, emanating the color of the forest all around them, the golden light streaming down through the canopy, in lines of light and dust.

"I've never stayed anywhere with anyone before, and it might be difficult for me," he went on. He was more sure of it now, with her eyes looking at him and her happiness, but in a way, less sure as well. He was starting to remember everything he'd loved about the Real world, his sailing and his freedom, going where he wanted to when he wanted to. He didn't want to stay here. He supposed that sometimes you just had to let go. "But I'll stay here, for you, as long as you want me to."

She smiled for a few moments, but she still didn't say anything. She looked down, staring at the mossy ground at her feet. Her hands were shaking. He noticed it with some concern, wondering what was wrong with her. Was it something he said? Was she...sick? But no, she wasn't Real, she couldn't get sick, could she? "Adelaide?" he asked, at last.

She looked up at him then and shook her head, pursing her lips tightly together. "You can leave," she said slowly, shakily. "You don't have to stay with me. I won't let you stay with me."

For a moment, he was happy. He'd wanted to leave for so long, and now he could! He could sail again; he missed the feel of the water under his feet, the wind blowing back his hair, forcing his way through the storms. He wanted it all, more than anything. But there was still Adelaide. "Are you sure?" he asked. "I don't want to just leave you here. You could...come with me."

She shook her head. "I can't touch the water. Just go."

He nodded, remembering how she'd never walked very far out onto the beach. She believed that she'd be washed away in the waves, dissolved into dust, drifted to open sea. She couldn't touch anything Real. It was the way a fairytale can never touch the real world, the way falling stars burn up before they reach the earth.

"Adelaide..." he said at last, "write a letter, or something. Throw it out to sea. Maybe somebody will find it. Maybe...maybe you are real, somehow or maybe you can become real." Hurt and happiness, hurt and happiness, wasn't she feeling it now? And wasn't she giving up the very thing he'd been about to give up, for her? That meant they were just the same, didn't it? She _had_ to be Real, somehow.

She only nodded though, and he hoped she'd been listening to him and would try it.

"Goodbye, Adelaide," he said.

"Goodbye, Mathieu," she replied.

He walked alone back to the beach and into the water. It felt cool and wet, refreshing on his legs, and then it was all gone.

He'd woken up with a bandage on his head, in a bed with white linen sheets covering him, in a room with solid, wood walls. He'd been puzzled at first, wondering where he was and where Adelaide was, before he remembered: she'd let him go. Now he was back in the Real world, as she'd call it, capitalized.

His friends told him that he'd been unconscious for a week, and they'd been starting to wonder if he'd pull through it. They said that at the end, his breathing had gotten so slow, like he was giving up and ready to stay there, wherever there was.

He tried telling them about Adelaide and the island, but they didn't understand. They only came to the conclusion that he'd had some pretty crazy dreams while he was unconscious, and he'd probably started breathing so slow when he'd said he'd stay with her. Good thing she'd told him no.

But it was more to him than that. She was more than a dream to him, and he hoped more than anything that she'd found her way here somehow, to the Real world. She was Real to him anyway, and maybe that counted for something. But he didn't find her letter, if she ever even wrote it, and he went on with his life, back to his sailing and his boats, until he'd all but forgotten about his pretend princess who dreamed of becoming Real.

Until now, that is, with the bottle in his hand. He looked at it again and pulled out the carefully folded note. The paper was old now and stained, but he could still read clearly in a cheerful, bubbly script, just the way he'd always imagined her handwriting to look like, it said: _Now am I Real, Mathieu?_

He smiled. She'd found her way out then, somehow, found her way to be Real. He chuckled; he could imagine her saying it, in her teasing, sing-song voice, dancing all around him. And he could imagine her stepping off the beach and into the cold water, hoping she wouldn't be washed away, but knowing deep down that she wouldn't. Because she _was_ Real, first to him, and now to the world.


End file.
